Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  It was a long time before these new amenities brought about any marked improvement in living conditions for the majority of the inhabitants of Winterstoke. The Wendle, which divided the town into two halves, had become a boundary line of very great social and economic importance. Although the southern part of the town accounted for by far the greater proportion of its population, the northern was the more exclusive and enjoyed a monopoly of its amenities. For the site of Ernest Hanmer’s model village on the north bank had become the town’s centre, and the old Westerport to Coltisham road (‘High Street’), Bridge Street and Ambling Street were its main thoroughfares. Along these streets stretched the principal shops, the discreet bow-fronted windows of old-established tradesmen and the more blatant plate-glass emporiums of later arrivals, while at the point of their intersection stood the Town Hall, facing St. Cenodoc’s parish church. Here towards the end of the century a considerable group of Georgian buildings which adjoined the Town Hall was demolished to make way for a free library, museum and art gallery. This great dour block of brick, encased by a thin shell of ashlar stonework, exhibited an odd confusion of Doric and Roman orders which contrasted strangely with the variegated Gothic of its near neighbour. Its appearance was hardly calculated to provoke a thirst for the arts, and its most popular department proved to be the public reading room which provided a welcome refuge for the old, the homeless, and the unwanted. Few visited the cases of geological specimens and local finds of stone implements in the museum or lingered long before the pictures in the gallery. These, before the Hanmer collection was acquired, consisted of some very large romantic landscapes by artists with high-sounding but unfamiliar names, a few scrupulously detailed works by lesser-known followers of the Pre-Raphaelite school, and a number of portraits of bygone mayors and counsellors in full regalia. Altogether it cannot be said that this example of Victorian cultural enterprise brought back to the grey lives of the people any of the colour, warmth or beauty of which they had for so long been deprived. A far greater boon to them was the Winterstoke Theatre Royal which, in the face of bitter opposition from every religious denomination in the town, opened its unholy doors at the corner of Bridge Street and Old Mill Lane in 1872. This was indisputably the happiest of all the Victorian contributions to Winterstoke, although a passer-by would hardly appreciate the fact from its somewhat drab façade. Perhaps its unknown architect deliberately set out to placate and mislead the puritans by designing an inscrutable exterior which would betray no inkling of the rococo splendours of plush and gilded stucco which it harboured. That the cold light of day could strip the magic from this interior could reveal that it was no more than a tawdry caricature of the rococo of the Golden Age, was of small moment. Even if the flesh was weak the old spirit which the joyless economists, politicians and theologians of the new age had so strenuously denied was here defiantly and unashamedly alive in the plump, naked cupids who trailed their garlands and spilled their brimming cornucopias over the proscenium arch, in the lightly draped nymphs and caryatids who upheld the hissing gas lights or the canopies of the stage boxes. This ‘temple of concupiscence’, as one dissenting minister called it (though few of his flock understood what he meant), was for the poor of Winterstoke a place of pure and unalloyed magic, bringing to the eye and ear pleasures they had been utterly denied for a hundred years. They packed the gods to welcome on the gaslit boards of this Theatre Royal the descendants of those strolling players who had delighted their ancestors in the far-off days when Wendle flowed clear and corn grew on Darley Bank.

  Even on this north side of the river, different parts of the town revealed subtle social and economic distinctions. Thus only the most prosperous and eminently respectable tradespeople dared to settle in the region to the west towards Winterstoke Park, where the doctors, solicitors, bankers and successful business men had their detached villas in the neighbourhood of Butterfield’s new Gothic Church of St. Mary. For shopkeepers and clerks there were the more modest stucco terraces in the north-east angle of the cross formed by the intersection of the main streets; an area bounded by the arc of Cemetery Road, where a dense crop of white marble in what had once been a meadow called Lower Leasowes showed that space in Winterstoke was as strictly rationed for the dead as for the living. Also in this quarter was the hospital founded by Sir Richard Blenkinsop and the new Grammar School founded by his son. The poorest quarter north of the river, though still considered respectable, was that to the east of Bridge Street. It was bounded, in the direction of Coltisham, by the high wall of the workhouse and by the tall buildings of ‘Blenkinsop’s Entire’ beside the river at the bottom of Old Mill Lane. These last looked in the distance like the roof-line of some French château and bathed the area in the sweet, cloying aroma of malt.

  Once across Daniel Leeds’ great iron bridge all pretence of civic dignity was soon lost. Only in Station Road had the Railway Hotel and Foster Brothers Livery Stables between them succeeded in preserving the tone of the north side. Elsewhere the locomotive depots, the gasworks and the canal basin were the only notable landmarks in a desert where terraced cottages, pubs, chapels, pawnshops and small factories jostled each other in a labyrinth of narrow streets. The meanest of these were about the canal basin and reflected the decay of the Lobstock Canal. Here in Canal Street and Wharf Road, houses originally better built and more spacious than their successors of the railway age had become decaying slum tenements, stubbornly refusing to die amid the desolation of empty warehouses, silent quays and evil-smelling docks where the swollen corpses of unwanted dogs floated in a scum of garbage on the stagnant water.

  Yet in spite of such evidences of poverty, this district bordering the south bank of the Wendle did contrive against almost overwhelming odds to preserve a certain air of shabby self-respect, a refusal to be defeated by the black blight which had eliminated from it every living thing except man. The inhabitants of the north side did not disown this part of the town; they deigned to acknowledge its existence and were not averse to visiting it if the occasion arose. It was a relationship which resembled that of master and servant in which each knew their place. The really unmentionable Winterstoke, the Winterstoke that most of those who dwelt north of the river contrived to forget, lay beyond the railway. Indeed the line of the Grand Central with its long embankment and its acres of marshalling yards formed a very convenient and substantial pale which kept this wild and savage territory out of sight and out of mind. For life in the crowded courts of Ketton, Darley Bank, Hanger Lane and Camp left no room for any of the niceties of civilized living. Intrepid explorers forced by necessity to enter this dreadful region returned with horrific tales of gory combats on spoil tips between fighting cocks, bull terriers and, not infrequently, their owners; of dead-drunken men clogging the gutters outside the ‘Woodcolliers’; of screaming, half-naked viragoes who tore out each other’s hair in handfuls before an audience of amused menfolk and scared, pale-faced children; of adolescents sleeping four in a bed with their parents, and of houses in which even the lower treads of the stairs had been torn out and chopped up for fuel. Such tales were inexpressibly shocking to polite Victorian ears and were usually reserved for male audiences. But they were not looked upon as evidence of the degradation to which the industrial order had reduced their fellow men, but as the natural behaviour of a barbarous and alien race. So far as the respectable townsmen were concerned it was as natural for a Hanger Lane miner to commit incest, to beat his wife insensible or to spend his Saturday night lying in a pool of his own vomit as it was for an African savage to walk naked or to wear a ring in his nose. To the ladies of north Winterstoke the whole area south of the railway was a terra incognita definitely out of bounds. Nursemaids were forbidden on pain of instant dismissal ever to trespass beyond the pale, while no mistress of an elegant villa in Park Road would dream of engaging domestic staff from such a quarter.

  Pavements and metalled roads, main drainage, gas and water mains spread rapidly through north Winterstoke and more slowly but sur
ely through the hinterland between the railway and the south bank of the Wendle. But here they stopped short. Only the roads over which clerks and managers walked or drove to the great works were metalled and adequately lit. For the rest, until the end of the century the night-soil carts continued to creak and jolt over unmade, miry ways as they went about their noisome business; whole courts continued to depend for water on a single well or stand-pipe, and only a few rare gas lamps, provided more for the benefit of the police than for the inhabitants, hissed and flickered in the draughts of narrow alley ways.

  Yet some progress had been made although there might seem to be little evidence of it. Though labour in the mines and in the works of Darley Bank and Great Ketton was no less, and in many cases more, exacting, hours were not so intolerably long and there was no longer child labour. Such sweated conditions were now confined to the obscurity of some of the small factories which lurked in the back streets and they would not survive there for many more years. The fight for reform had gone steadily forward and was beginning to bear fruit. But, alas, in the course of the hard century which was now passing the true aim had been lost to sight. The battle was no longer against a system which had enslaved, degraded and deluded mankind; the demand was for a larger share in its spoils and a voice in its control.

  What changes there have been since, thin ghosts from an atomic age, we visited Winterstoke at the end of the reign of the first Elizabeth, to watch the salmon lying in the clear eddies of the river under St. John’s Bridge, to see the charcoal burners at their work in High Hanger Wood, and in the Lob valley the glow of Alfred Darley’s first furnace. How many worlds away now seem those bright, brave figures who strolled on that still summer evening through vanished gardens; how thin and faint the tinkle of the virginals. We come again now as an autumn dusk falls over Winterstoke to stand on the bare hilltop of High Hanger Down. It is the end of Victoria’s long reign; the end, too, of the age of ‘unconquered steam’. Looking southwards over Deepforest, the landscape has scarcely altered. The scars of distant mines are lost in the long perspectives of tree and copse and softly folded landscape. A far-off plume of steam from a North-Western train; a reach of the Lobstock Canal reflecting a glint of sunset light between the trees; these are the only evidence of change. But when we look west and north, what a dour, fierce world of sound and fury do we see. Dusk and drifting smoke are beginning to blur the outlines of the town, but the gas lighters with their long poles are already going their rounds, pin-pointing with light one after another of the maze of streets. Closely and clearly beyond the river march the twinkling lights, but towards the foreground they begin to straggle and falter, to leave pools of mysterious darkness, to be dimmed by the flare from some unseen furnace, or to be momentarily lost in an eddy of steam like a moon in cloudwrack. We can hear the distant rumble of cartwheels over cobbles and from the railway marshalling yards the clash of buffers and creak of snatched chain couplings. The red eye of Ketton Junction down-distant flicks to green as we watch, and in the necklace of warning lights over the junction itself other green lights appear. An expectant lull seems to fall over the activities of the yards in the few moments which elapse before the down ‘Comet’ bursts out of the mouth of Darley Bank Tunnel in a sudden flurry of smoke and sound and flies down the bank towards Ketton curve. A very different train this from that earlier ‘Comet’ which, drawn by the ill-fated Tubal in the old racing days, met disaster on the canal bridge; a shining serpent of bogie corridor coaches headed by a sleek high-boilered ‘Atlantic’ locomotive, her coupled wheels a blur of flailing side rods, yet holding her train securely under the power of the vacuum brake.

  No trees grow now on this side of High Hanger Hill, only a close turf more grey than green and pitted and pocked like some gigantic rabbit warren by the scars of old workings. The gentle contours of its lower slopes have been altogether obliterated, buried deep beneath a miniature mountain range of sullenly smouldering pit mounds from whose sharp summits the tram rail ends jut skywards like slipways for a space ship. Between the mounds we can see the winding wheels of High Hanger Pit spinning in a drift of gaslit steam. Directly below us in the Lob valley the hammers and stamps of the Darley Bank Forge are pounding with a sound like muffled gun-fire and here again there is the inevitable drift of white steam, steam jetting from the hammer exhausts to mingle with the smoke of the forge furnaces.

  The Cistercian Abbey, Richard Hanmer’s great house, the Darley Bank Ironworks, we have seen each in turn dominate Winterstoke, become the centre about which its life has revolved. But now, as we stand here in the dusk, we are left in no doubt that the mastery has passed from Darley Bank to the Great Ketton Steel Works. The furnaces of Great Ketton no longer flare continuously as did the open throats of New Bank and Bedlam, and no longer are they backed by smoking heaps of coking coal. Conical caps have stopped their throats and they are fed by lifts which crawl up their pitiless steel sides. Only when a cone is lowered to admit a charge does the familiar glare light up the sky. Yet if the crude drama of old Darley Bank is lacking, Great Ketton conveys an impression of concentrated heat and power, of a vast plutonic energy which is the more menacing for being partly concealed. We may feel that the name of Bedlam is far more apt for Great Ketton Steelworks than it was for Darley Bank. Not here the blatant, white-hot simplicity and easily explicable rhythms of the old ironworks. The steelworks confounds the eye and ear with a perpetual pandemonium of lights and sounds whose origins can only be guessed at. There is a steady torrent of sound which might be the furnace blast or the rolling mill and is most probably a common chord struck by both. But over and above this ground bass come sudden metallic detonations which reverberate like the clash of cymbals; or a crash like that of a falling tree from the direction of the coking plant where a cloud of steam billows up. Mysterious lights gleam and vanish about the feet of the furnaces; some spontaneous internal eruption of white-hot metal momentarily reveals a row of roof-lights in dazzling outline; wheeling arcs of fire from unknown and invisible sources play upon drifting smoke. Then high on the side of the slag tip a ladle spills its contents and for an instant the whole sky seems to flower in flame as the thin cooled shell of the slag bursts as it falls and its molten yolk streams down the steep slope. The lights of the town look pale as we turn away.

  Once out of range of Great Ketton and Darley Bank, it is quieter and more peaceful down in the town than it is upon the slopes of High Hanger Hill. The cobbles and gaslit pavements of Station Road are almost deserted for the station has already dispatched its evening spate of local traffic and the late trains from London and the North are still to come. From behind the high wall come the usual sounds of railway activity: the squeal and grunt of protesting wheel flanges as a shunting engine runs over points; the inevitable clash of buffers and, of course, that ubiquitous sight and sound of escaping steam as a locomotive safety valve lifts and sends a white cloud billowing overhead on the wind. ‘Unconquered steam’—steam driving locomotives, blowing furnaces, wielding enormous hammers, pumping water, lifting coal, driving sails from the sea and turning a thousand machines; everywhere steam. But listen! There is a new and quite unfamiliar sound in the air, faint but growing louder as we approach the entry to Foster Brothers stable yard. It is repetitive yet occasionally hesitant, part cough, part sneeze; an asthmatic wheezing now feeble, now loud. It could be a machine of some kind, though no self-respecting steam engine since the days of Thomas Newcomen has ever laboured in such travail. Undoubtedly the sound comes from Fosters’ yard. Looking down the entry we can see its source standing under a gas lamp. It looks at first sight like one of Fosters’ high dog-carts, yet the whole vehicle is enveloped in a haze of blue smoke and is being wracked and shaken to and fro by some invisible force. Two men seem to be wrestling with this mystery, one with his head and shoulders buried in the open boot at the rear of the vehicle, and another lying prone on the cobbles. With a final gasp and splutter the noise stops, the smoke dissolves and the man with his head in the boot st
raightens his back. We have had an unexpected glimpse of Winterstoke’s first horseless carriage and heard the first feeble pulings of a newborn power.

  Chapter Eleven

  UNTIL THE AUTUMN of 1896 very few people were aware that one of the new-fangled horseless carriages was lurking in their midst. Young Bob and Peter Foster spent most of their time tinkering with their strange contraption in the privacy of the family mews, often to the annoyance of their father’s cabmen and the alarm of the horses. Stablemen complained bitterly of the machine’s poisonous breath and of the treacherous pools of dark oil which it persistently excreted on to their swept cobbles. To soothe these ruffled tempers, George Foster would make a show of reprimanding his boys, but secretly he was proud of their pioneering efforts. As for grandfather William, who had accompanied his father on the old Eclipse and still cherished his long, polished post-horn, he found the horseless carriage a great joke, little dreaming, as he chuckled over its strange antics, that it would one day avenge John Foster’s defeat. Occasionally, after nightfall, the carriage would furtively emerge to make a brief, hesitant sortie through unfrequented back streets, its candle-lamp eyes blinking with the vibration, its exhaust tuff-tuffing manfully and its automatic inlet valve sneezing, to the astonishment of stray drunks and belated pavement loungers. For the law saw no distinction between such carriages and the lumbering traction engines which hauled the farmer’s threshing drum, and refused to concede them the freedom of the road. As soon as that freedom was grudgingly acknowledged in November, 1896, however, the Foster brothers’ horseless carriage appeared boldly in the light of day before a wider audience. Bob and Peter could not join the triumphant procession of cars from London to Brighton on ‘Emancipation Day’ but they celebrated the occasion as best they could by driving up Bridge Street and along the length of the High Street, an exploit which won them a somewhat facetious and patronizing paragraph in the columns of the Winterstoke Sentinel. To the youth of the town the brothers were heroes, but by the older generation they were generally regarded with disfavour. Anyone who owned or drove horses hated the sight of them. Horses were certainly terrified by the machine, and more than once an angry driver struck out at Bob with his whip as he struggled to control his rearing and plunging team. Again, when the best method of starting the engine was to create a petrol fire so as to encourage the surface carburettor to vaporize its fuel, it was difficult to persuade the perturbed onlookers that the machine was not about to explode and that the services of the fire brigade were not required. The opposition made no attempt to conceal its delight when, growing more venturesome, the brothers attempted to scale Emberley Hill with mechanical results so disastrous that they had to be towed back to the Mews behind ‘Rosie’, the oldest and most staid member of the Foster brothers’ stud. But in spite of the enmity and the setbacks the young Fosters persevered, for they dreamed, not only of larger and faster cars, but of motor omnibuses which would replace the horsedrawn ‘knifeboards’ which their father ran between the High Street and the railway station. In the event these dreams proved a little premature, for steam and the rail had still one more card to play before the motor bus could come into its own and they played it through the medium of another new agent—electricity.